Upstage, a Seoul-based AI startup, ships Solar Pro 2 as a compact alternative to frontier-scale models for document pipelines — banks, insurers, and public agencies that need Korean OCR, retrieval, and structured extraction without frontier API costs or foreign data residency. It competed in South Korea's ~₩530 billion sovereign foundation-model program alongside LG AI Research and SK Telecom. Builders typically reach it through Upstage's API rather than self-hosted open weights.